Since I was on-site today, I decided to grace my cow orkers
with my presence during lunch. When we left to go, my
manager said "Mark, why don't you ride with me?" Great.

Turns out he just wanted to let me know that unless I wanted
to come onsite every day, they weren't gonna continue my
contract after the middle of September. (I tried to point
out that the work I did didn't demand my physical presence,
but he said they needed bodies to show for "marketing"
purposes.)

This despite the fact that they are desperately in need of
sysadmin help (but they just pay me to program). Someone
cracked our RHat box and they didn't want to spend any time
cleaning up. Oh, and they are losing their other competant
Unix guy this week, but they don't know that yet.

Also, the FBI came by today with a Navy security guy. The
infosec people in the FBI are (Carnivore not withstanding)
pretty cool. My cow orker and I had a great time knocking
management with them. We probably shouldn't have talked
quite loud enough for managment to hear, though.

Tried to work on AddressBook.pm, but didn't get much done.
Flourescent lighting just doesn't do it for me. That, and
working at home has kinda grown on me -- even with Ginger
and Basil running around and banging on my office door.

I've been looking over the information on Microsoft's
website about LDAP
schema that they use for Outlook lookups. However, I
found that the information
on OpenLDAP's site was more concise and to-the-point.

I wanted to comment on an article, but I didn't realize
that I needed certification. That's reasonable.

My current project is to build an online contacts database
for one of our clients. I need to get the whole thing
accessible via LDAP and allow them the ability to edit
it on the web. Initially, I foolishly thought Surely
Outlook Express allows you to edit LDAP data and I can
eliminate the web portion for now, right? --
Wrong!

So now I have people all over me because I gave them a
ridiculously short time estimate based on almost zero
information about the project.
I guess that'll teach me.

I've been looking at these various projects that are
already out there and most don't fit for one reason or
another. Either they

are in a language I don't know or have time to learn
(PHP, python), or

have no access control, or

use a database for a backend instead of LDAP, or

any mixture of the above.

Ugh. So I'm probably gonna take ldap-abook and see if
I can tweak that the way I want it. This may even be a good
chance to bring in the Wizard
module.

Later

Well, I've been hacking on Abook.pm for a bit now. I sent
out a
post to the almost totally inactive ldap-abook-tech
mailing list. I think it would be great if we could create
some sort of abstract AddressBook class. From there you
could create AddressBook::LDAP, AddressBook::Palm,
AdressBook::BBDB, etc. Awesome! I'd love to have a way to
easily share my bbdb addys between machines and with other
people. This would be ideal.